We started working on Brexit and Beyond in early 2017 when we realised there was a distinct gap in the market when it came to easily accessible yet scholarly works on Brexit. Full-length academic articles were often too lengthy and discipline-specific to appeal to the average reader. In any case, they take a rather long time to reach the market, such that by then the real world often has moved on. Nowhere more so than with Brexit! By contrast, the readily availabile opinion pieces and op-eds through which much of the ‘here and now’ of the Brexit debate took place lacked the rigour of academic works.

So we resolved to create a volume of short, accessible pieces on Brexit which would appeal to a general audience, while being informed by their authors’ long-standing scholarship. UCL Press embraced the idea with enthusiasm.

We also wanted to work with UCL Press because of the benefits of the open access model. Given the acrimony surrounding Britain’s changing relationship to Europe, we felt it was particularly important to bring rigorous discussion of the topic out of the academic ivory tower. To freely provide a volume with some of the biggest names in their field to students and interested citizens alike was, we believed, the easiest – and most direct – way to achieve this. The Brexit vote highlighted a yawning gap between academic debates and the concerns of many British citizens. Meanwhile, the social media ‘echo chambers’ have contributed to divided conversations and the polarisation of viewpoints. Breaking through these divisions and starting a shared conversation on the future of Europe was our aim with this volume.

UCL Press supported our book every step of the way. We had frequent meetings to discuss content, production and marketing, benefitting from the input of all the team members. The book itself came out in January and has been downloaded over 10,000 times in the past three months. What has been most heartening, though, is how pleased readers themselves have been about receiving their ‘free book’. One individual who approached us at our launch event in Brussels couldn’t believe – his words – that such a high quality product would be available for anyone to download. And, more pleasing still, he had sent copies to his friends and family. The hope is that, as more and more people engage with our contributors’ arguments, a greater number of citizens – of the UK and the EU – are brought into the detailed discussions we should be having after the referendum. Only in this way can we attempt to further the democratisation of knowledge. For facilitating these conversations – more and more every day – we are very grateful to the team at UCL Press.

Brexit and Beyond: Rethinking the Futures of Europe can be downloaded for free here.

Join us for the launch of a new book with contributions from 28 leading experts on Brexit and the future of Europe, edited by Uta Staiger and Benjamin Martill.

Brexit will have significant consequences for the country, for Europe, and for global order. And yet much discussion of Brexit in the UK has focused on the causes of the vote and on its consequences for the future of British politics. This volume examines the consequences of Brexit for the future of Europe and the European Union, adopting an explicitly regional and future-oriented perspective missing from many existing analyses.

Drawing on the expertise of 28 leading scholars from a range of disciplines,‘Brexit and Beyond’ (UCL Press) offers various different perspectives on the future of Europe, charting the likely effects of Brexit across a range of areas, including institutional relations, political economy, law and justice, foreign affairs, democratic governance, and the idea of Europe itself. Whilst the contributors offer divergent predictions for the future of Europe after Brexit, they share the same conviction that careful scholarly analysis is in need – now more than ever – if we are understand what lies ahead for the EU.

Speakers:

Helen Drake, Professor of French and European Studies, LoughboroughPiet Eeckhout, Dean of the Faculty of Laws and Professor of EU Law, UCLSimon Hix, Harold Laski Professor of Political Science, LSEKalypso Nicolaïdis, Professor of International Relations, University of Oxford

Dr Uta Staiger is the co-founder and Executive Director of the UCL European Institute. Her research examines the relationship between culture and politics, drawing together insights from modern European thought, the arts, and the history of European integration. She is particularly interested in mid-twentieth-century German theory and philosophy that seeks to straddle aesthetics and the idea of the political. Uta also holds the position of Pro-Vice-Provost (Europe), a strategic role shaping UCL’s engagement with Europe, and acting as advocate for UCL’s work on the continent.

Dr Benjamin Martill is a Dahrendorf Fellow in Europe after Brexit at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research looks at how political ideology and party politics affect foreign policymaking, with particular reference to the politics of Cold War strategy in Europe. At LSE, Benjamin contributes to the work of the Dahrendorf Forum, a joint research venture between LSE Ideas and the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. He was previously Lecturer in Politics at Canterbury Christ Church University and Research Associate at the UCL European Institute.

Europe and the World – A Law Review aims to contribute to legal scholarship on the place of Europe in the world, with a particular but by no means exclusive focus on EU external relations law. As a peer-reviewed open-access journal by a renowned university publisher it makes highest-quality work promptly available to a global audience. Open-access makes individual contributions and legal scholarship more visible, accessible, and accountable.

The journal serves as a forum where the national, international and EU perspectives meet and engage. The journal is therefore irreverent of traditional distinctions between EU, international, and national law. While primarily offering legal doctrinal and theoretical analyses, the journal also publishes multi-disciplinary work and political science and international relations contributions with an external perspective on the law of EU’s external relations.

The journal publishes article-length papers and shorter pieces offering an analysis of topical issues or recent cases, as well as review articles and special issues. The journal welcomes the submission of highest-quality papers in the following formats:

Please submit your paper with an abstract of about 250 words and 5 keywords (for details please see the journal’s Author Guidelines) by email to europeandtheworld@ucl.ac.uk. We are aiming for a quick revision process, which should not usually exceed 10 weeks.

Europe and the World – A Law Review aims to contribute to legal scholarship on the place of Europe in the world, with a particular but by no means exclusive focus on the EU’s external relations law.

The journal serves as a forum where the national, international and EU perspectives meet and engage. The journal is therefore irreverent of traditional distinctions between EU, international, and national law. While primarily offering legal doctrinal and theoretical analyses, the journal also publishes multi-disciplinary work and political science and international relations contributions with an external perspective on the law of EU’s external relations.

The editors of Europe and the World – A Law Review are delighted to announce the launch of their journal and invite papers for publication.

Europe and the World – A Law Review aims to contribute to legal scholarship on the place of Europe in the world, with a particular but by no means exclusive focus on EU external relations law. As a peer-reviewed open-access journal by a renowned university publisher it makes highest-quality work promptly available to a global audience. Open-access makes individual contributions and legal scholarship more visible, accessible, and accountable.

The journal serves as a forum where the national, international and EU perspectives meet and engage. The journal is therefore irreverent of traditional distinctions between EU, international, and national law. While primarily offering legal doctrinal and theoretical analyses, the journal also publishes multi-disciplinary work and political science and international relations contributions with an external perspective on the law of EU’s external relations.

The journal publishes article-length papers and shorter pieces offering an analysis of topical issues or recent cases, as well as review articles and special issues. The journal welcomes the submission of highest-quality papers in the following formats:

Papers published in the journal will be freely available online via UCL Press, starting with the first issue in July 2017.

Submission Procedure

Please submit your paper with an abstract of about 250 words and 5 keywords (for details please see the journal’s Author Guidelines) by email to europeandtheworld@ucl.ac.uk. We are aiming for a quick revision process, which should not usually exceed 10 weeks.

For all queries concerning the submission of papers please contact the Editors-in-chief at: europeandtheworld@ucl.ac.uk.

Submitted papers should adhere to the format requirements of Europe and the World: A Law Review. Before your submission please visit the author guidelines for the journal at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press/browse-books/europe-and-the-world.

Christina Eckes, University of Amsterdam

Piet Eeckhout, University College London

Anne Thies, University of Reading

For more information on the Editors, the Editorial Board and the Journal please visit: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucl-press/browse-books/europe-and-the-world

One of the common claims made about social media is that it has facilitated a new form of political intervention aligned with the practices and inclinations of the young. Last week I attended the launch of an extremely good book by Henry Jenkins and his colleagues called By Any Media Necessary which documents how young people use social and other media to become politically involved, demonstrating that this is real politics not merely ‘slacktivism’, a mere substitute for such political involvement.

And yet, currently I am seeing social media buzzing with young people advocating a petition to revoke the Brexit vote, which only highlights the absence of a similar ‘buzz’ prior to the vote. I await more scholarly studies in confirmation, but my impression is that we did not see the kind of massive activist campaign by young people to prevent Brexit that we saw with campaigns behind Bernie Sanders in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK.

The failure to create an attractive activist-led mass social media campaign to get young people to vote for Remain is reflected in the figures; although 18-24 year-olds were the most favourable segment towards Remain, only 36% of this group actually voted at all. As such, Brexit represents a catastrophic failure in young people’s social media, from which we need to learn. Being based in ethnography, our Why We Post project argued that we need to study the absence of politics in ordinary people’s social media as much as focusing on when it does appear. But the key lesson is surely that just because social media can facilitate young people’s involvement in politics doesn’t mean it will, even when that politics impacts upon the young.

One possibility is that social media favours a more radical idealistic agenda. By contrast, even though the impact of Brexit might be greater and more tangible, the remain campaign was led by a conservative prime minister, backing a Europe associate with bureaucracy and corporate interest, and was a messy grouping of people with different ideological perspectives, that made it perhaps less susceptible to the social media mechanisms of aggregated sharing.

At the same time I would claim that our work can help us to understand the result. My own book Social Media in an English Village is centred on the way English people re-purposed social media as a mechanism for keeping ‘others’, and above all one’s neighbours, at a distance. I cannot demonstrate this but I would argue that by supporting Brexit the English were doing in politics at a much larger scale exactly what my book claims they were doing to their neighbours at a local level: expressing a sense that ‘others’ were getting too close and too intrusive and needed to be pushed back to some more appropriate distance. And it is this rationale which may now have devastated the prospects for young people in England.